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I'm guess I'm not convinced that those are actually better at creating psychos. The 60s and 70s were fertile ground for New Age religions, sex cults, exotic drugs, serial killers, and Godless communists.
My assessment of the current internet is that it probably has a far more significant population take-up of New Age religions, sex cults, exotic drugs, serial killers, and Godless communists than the 60s and 70s did. I'm not highly confident about the math, but it looks to me like what would be maybe a few dozen-thousand people in a handful of geographic hotspots is now multiple millions of people spread through every layer of society, fully normalized and monetized. See the seminal "toaster fuckers" meme for a straightforward description of the mechanism, then observe that the Trans movement we're now perhaps seeing the tail end of would not have been wildly out of place in the 60s or 70s, but there it would have been grassroots and confined to a neighborhood or two in each of a few major cities, and the current iteration has been nation-wide and received overwhelming support from most institutions of note.
I do not think our current era is winning the less-crazy game.
I almost mentioned the toaster thing, yeah.
See, I think you can have culture/technology/whatever that breeds more bizarre views without effectively cultivating homicidal ones. There is reason to believe that Internet activism is significantly less effective at mobilizing actual people. It certainly doesn't get them into bars and malls and third spaces. You could imagine cultural phenomena that are eye-wateringly, post-ironically strange without actually hurting and killing people.
Actually, we don't really have to imagine, do we? That's the Satanic Panic. It's thinkpieces about video games encouraging violence or licentiousness or misogyny. You can't suggest a damn thing without someone countersignaling it and getting backlash in turn.
We may or may not have some fundamental disagreements on trans politics, but that makes for a pretty illustrative example. Has the overwhelming aesthetic weirdness actually translated to violence? Does holding specific views on gender presentation actually make people more likely to bomb government buildings? Are trans men wildly overrepresented at riots?
(I legitimately don't know the answer to this. Testosterone is a hell of a drug.)
Speech is not inherently violent. Aesthetics are not inherently violent. The outrageous weirdness of modern culture has not yet given rise to 70s levels of violence. It's quite possible that they never will.
A good summary of my long-term participation here would be that I'm deeply skeptical that the assertion you lay out here fundamentally is or will remain true, but arguing it would require more space than is available in the present margin. Suffice to say, I think I have a good grasp of your argument here, and though I am very worried it is wrong, I can readily recognize that there's an abundance of persuasive evidence on your side.
To sketch out an initial sally, though, consider how you're approaching the concept of "violence" here. I assume you're referring to something like US homicide rate by year. I think the way most people look at that graph is that you have "US Society", and in the 1960s something goes wrong with "US Society" and a real murder problem develops, and then in the 90s "US Society" finally gets a handle on things and the problem largely resolves itself. So we look at the present situation, and we compare it to the 60s and 70s, and we say "by objective measures, this problem is not nearly as bad as what we had before, and what we had before was itself survivable, so we're probably going to be okay."
As I see it, a more accurate description would be that something went wrong with "US Society" in the 1960s, and a real murder problem develops... and over the next thirty years, that problem and the root causes giving rise to it pretty thoroughly destroy the previously existing "US Society" and replace it with a very different social order. The accumulated radical changes are eventually sufficient to get the problem being measured back down to a manageable level, but the old society is fundamentally and permanently changed in the process.
In the 1970s, we had tens of thousands of bombings in a world where dynamite and nitrogen fertilizer were available in hardware stores on a cash-and-carry basis. That world no longer exists.
In the 1970s, we had lots and lots of murders in a world with 1970s trauma medicine. Our current murder rate is not backstopped by 1970s trauma medicine.
In the 1970s, we had violent crime waves policed by cops filling out paper forms and relying on eyewitnesses. Now we have an automated surveillance state that would have given the East Germans wet dreams.
In the 1970s, we had a highly-cohesive and values-homogenous culture. Now we are polarized and atomized to an almost incomprehensible degree, and signs of broad-based values incoherence are rampant.
The question is, how should we frame current data? Is it the raw murder rate, or is it the murder rate versus the energy expended to suppress murder? The latter, it seems to me, gives a more sobering view.
Firearms culture, militarized policing, mass incarceration, pervasive surveillance, and radically advanced trauma medicine are among the bigger cards we played to get things back in line the last time social trends got going in the wrong direction. If they get going in the wrong direction now, we don't get to replay these cards; whatever we see is the trend with these adaptions already taken into account. I'm skeptical that many cards that big remain in our hand, and were such cards available, whether we would recognize a continuous "US Society" on the other side of playing them.
More generally, I'm not sure what is meant by speech and aesthetics not being "inherently violent". I observe a strong correlation between harshness of words and harshness of actions. Not a perfect correlation, certainly, but a much, much stronger one than we might infer from "...but words will never hurt me." Words have often gotten people killed. Words have often coordinated violence at every scale from the interpersonal to continent-spanning war. It does not seem to me that a clean demarcation exists where the words "those people are the problem, we should kill them" are totally fine, and it's only the mob actually coming together and killing those people that's the problem.
You know I've seen this argument repeated by commenters on Steve Sailer's blog and I wondered: there have to be statistics out there that'd let us correct for the impact of radically advanced trauma medicine on the murder rate. Surely someone can calculate, say, what is the ratio of gangbangers who get shot but end up getting saved through surgery?
Unfortunately, this statistic is confounded by the shift in calibers for gunshot wounds.
When is this alleged shift supposed to have occurred? 9x19 Parabellum and 0.45 ACP have been the dominant cartridges in police and civilian use since the 1930s, and the two runners up 0.22 Long rifle and the "modern" 12 Gauge Shotgun cartridge both date back to the 1880s.
Yes 5.56 NATO is a relatively new cartridge that only saw wide-spread civilian adoption in the aftermath of the cold-war but that's a rifle cartridge and rifles represent a relatively small percentage of recorded homicides in the US. Approx. 2,700 out of 81,000 if the FBI's crime data explorer is to be believed. Even if we assume that 100% of homicides committed with an unrecorded type were committed with a 5.56 Rifle that's still not much more than the number of people killed with conventional handguns.
While semiautomatics have existed and been common in sporter and military environments before WWII, police and criminal violence overwhelmingly favored the revolver into the 1970s. When they moved away from it, they moved from .38/.357 (and heavily favoring the bigger-but-weaker-.380) as a common round to 9mm and eventually 0.45 ACP, further helped by longer effective barrels (as well as more rounds and faster reloads, at least for anyone not named Miculek).
See here for a breakdown of how vast that difference was.
Common knowledge has the aftermath of 1986 Miami Shootout as the turning point for the law enforcement side of the equation, and that is genuinely where federal officers started moving toward more, bigger, and more powerful ammo. State police varies a lot more. And criminal use is hard to measure... but that ojp.gov report puts Philadelphia deaths as going from rarely (3%) to often (21%) 9mm pistol between 1985 and 1990, and pistols as a category were still less common than the .38/357 revolvers alone.
My understanding is that 0.38 Special is roughly equivalent to 9x19mm Parabellum in terms of terminal ballistics with 9mm ultimately winning out on the basis of being more compact, that that 0.45 and 9mm have killed a roughly equal number of people over the years, but I hadn't considered the 0.357 mag side of things. I may owe @hydroacetylene an apology.
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